Category Archives: Twilight of the Roundtable

Why I Won’t Be Contributing to the Twilight Roundtable

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The entire Twilight Roundtable is here.
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fuck-twilight-t-shirt

Originally, I had intended on writing something about the fourth and final book in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, but I just couldn’t do it and wrote an email to Noah explaining why. He asked if I’d put the email up as a post, so here it is, slightly modified (but only slightly).

Oh Noah,

I’ve gotta bail on the Twilight roundtable. I have been dealing with a few extra things of late, but really it’s just because I don’t give enough of a shit to write anything on what was the most terrible book that I’ve ever finished (there’s been worse — e.g., Malazon book 1 — but I wisely quit them). At least I know what women, many of whom are my friends, are reading in their fixation on YA novels. Then again, maybe I wish I didn’t know. Reading the book only confirmed what I thought about the movies, but with a whole lot more repetitious moaning and anxiety thrown in. The filmmakers had the good sense, or were forced by the demands of their medium, to either throw a lot of that out or turn it into a ludicrous over-sexualized spectacle of yearning. The movies were fun, the books aren’t. But even regarding politics, there wasn’t much of a surprise for me: the Cullens are representative of realpolitik America, who use the threat of overwhelming power to keep the evil others, the Volturi, at bay. As Edward says, they’re cowards below the surface. And I really don’t disagree with the pop feminists out there about this book. The men and women take traditional roles: Alice likes clothing, Esme is a homemaker, Edward is the artist, Carlisle the intellectual, etc.. And then there’s Bella who finally achieves self satisfaction by being admired by Edward. She’ll never have to work for eternity. Her child is so perfect, as described on every page. What are her interests in music, books, or anything else? Meyer doesn’t know or care. What we do know is that Bella’s interested in babies and husbands. Of course, Meyer rigs all this with rules for her fantasy that make all this knuckledragging wish fulfillment seem okay. And it is in the diegesis, just like Dirty Harry‘s fascism, but not so much if one wants a life like this. A truly obnoxious read in just about every way: stylistically, ideologically … even plot-wise (the structure seemed to be made ad hoc without an editor).

Anyway, I just don’t want to spend any more time thinking about such idiocy. Sorry, man.

Bella As a Mormon Goddess In Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight

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250px-TwilightbookMuch has been made of the fact that Stephenie Meyer is a Mormon and that her wildly popular Twilight series contains a romance that demands no sex before marriage for fantastical reasons that at times stretch the bounds of credulity. Some have argued that this is a kind of proselytizing technique, a different version of the Mormon missionaries knocking on your door and converting your daughters to the bizarre religion. While I think that Meyer’s Mormonism deeply affects her writing, as religious beliefs and other worldviews necessarily affect any writer, the more interesting Mormon doctrine infusing Twilight is, in my opinion, the uniquely Mormon version of the Garden of Eden story. That apple on the front cover is not there for nothing. And it isn’t the temptation of sex at all that is at the heart of the controversial Mormon doctrine. It’s all about female power.

To begin with, I am going to admit that I am not a typical nor a conservative Mormon. My own beliefs are in process, so it is possible that I may end up distorting some doctrines without intending to. I will also try to point out what is doctrine and what is my own implications to be drawn from the doctrine. I also need to state up front that while I believe that understanding Mormonism is a useful way to understand some parts of Twilight, I do not by any means think that the series can be reduced to Mormonism. No writer of any interest simply parrots a religious belief, and I think Meyer has been extremely inventive in her retelling of this Mormon myth. I do not know if this was done consciously or not and it hardly matters.

In either case, there is no intention here to slam Meyer, her book, or to continue the rather disturbing trend of making a book written by a woman and loved by many women young and old into a point for denigrating women and their interests or achievements. I recently wrote an essay called In Defense of Twilight in which I reacted to a recent writing convention I had gone to where multiple panels ended up being “Twilight bashing.” The panelists openly admitted to never having read a single sentence of the series, but still felt perfectly well qualified to mock it and its proponents because it wasn’t “real literature” or because whatever version they had heard was “simply ridiculous.”

This reminded me too sharply of my years in graduate school at Princeton in the 1990s, when women students asked the all-male professors on staff why we had no female role models and we were told there were simply no women — on the planet —who were qualified to be hired at Princeton. In addition, when I asked a professor why, in a course of German Romanticism, there was not a single woman listed on the list of course materials, he replied that we simply had “no time” to study the “minor authors of Romanticism.” We were at Princeton, so of course, we were going to study all the “important” authors who were the men that had been venerated since Romanticism itself. We were certainly not going to investigate the patriarchy that had chosen those men as “most important” from the first.

After spending several years teaching German at a university, I eventually gave up academia in pursuit of a career as a young adult fantasy writer. In the past several years since I was published, I have become increasingly disturbed by the outcries (by men) in various news outlets since J.K. Rowling and Meyer have become both wealthy and powerful by writing children’s stories. What is the world coming to, if women writers (not to mention women editors) are taking control of the publishing industry? Where are the books for boys?

We are supposedly facing a national crisis because there are NO books written for boys and our poor young men will be forced to read that “icky” Twilight if there is nothing to counter this trend. Young men reading Twilight is surely the proof that our civilization has reached its nadir, because no one wants young men learning to have sexual self-control in a relationship with a woman, nor do we want them to be that dangerously “feminized” Edward Cullen who can read minds and has become a “vegetarian.” (Worse still would be women becoming used to the idea that attractive young men might rip off their shirts and display their washboard abs at every moment to the catcalls of the crowd, because only men should be able to demand a sexual display like that, yes?)
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The Mormon story of the Garden of Eden is a variant of the original. Adam and Eve were placed in the garden and were told not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree because it would mean their deaths. But Mormons do not believe in original sin. They call the choice Adam and Eve made a “transgression” rather than a “sin”. What this means is that they took the fruit knowing that it would make them mortal and send them out of God’s presence and into the world. They broke a law, but it was a law that they had to break. It was only by being forced out of the garden that the rest of the “Plan of Salvation” or “Plan of Happiness” could come to be. Mormon scholar Daniel Judd argues that the Fall was a step downward, but also a step “forward.”

Furthermore, Mormons do not believe that Adam and Eve were sent out of the garden because of a sexual transgression. Sex is, in Mormon theology, not an evil to be avoided by the most pure. Quite the contrary (despite what you may think, based on the accusations that Meyer is attempting to convert young readers to sexual abstinence), sex is considered a holy act. Dallin H. Oaks, one of the current “apostles” of the Mormon Church writes “The power to create mortal life is the most exalted power God has given his children”. Mormons insist on the use of sex only within the bonds of marriage, but there is no psychic spiritual guilt to be associated with the act itself. Mormon couples are generally assured that sex is good for their marriage and that it is not only because they are meant to multiple and replenish the Earth (a commandment that many Mormons take to heart), but also to build bonds of love and commitment between spouses.

Finally, instead of seeing Eve as a figure of hatred or blame, Mormons praise Eve for her decision to take the fruit first, because she saw more wisely than Adam did that living a life of joy would also entail experiencing pain. There are some Mormons who believe (and at this point I will say that this is not doctrine, but rather speculation I have heard repeated inside the church) that Adam and Eve engaged in a thousand year long debate on the topic of the fruit and whether or not to take it. Adam and Eve could not have children in the garden and therefore could not fulfill the other commandment which God had given them, in addition to not partaking of the fruit, which was to have children. Again, in Mormon theology this is not because they could not have sex, but only because their bodies were not mortal and were not fully capable of producing children. Speculation again is all I can use to answer why. Perhaps because having children inherently causes pain (in childbirth, but also in many other ways) and pain could not be part of the Garden of Eden.

I am not the first scholar to see Twilight through the lens of the Mormon creation story. Lisa Lampert-Weissing has written a fascinating study of Twilight as a retelling of Milton’s Paradise Lost. She sees Twilight in the long tradition of women writers following Mary Wollstonecraft-Shelley, who wrote about the “monster” in Frankenstein that is in many ways Eve’s side of the story of the creation and the Fall. Though Frankenstein’s monster is purportedly male, he enacts many female dilemmas, as being created second and seen as a dark creature, full of sin. Lampert-Weissing wisely sees the importance of free will and “agency” in Mormon doctrine and cleverly argues that Bella herself is engaged in a project of making herself an equal to Edward by becoming a vampire. She wants to not only be Lois Lane, but Superman. She wants to be able to protect herself and her child and not depend on Edward for that. She wants the power that becoming a vampire will give her, the eternal youth that will make her Edward’s equal in eternal beauty, and she wants to be god-like, as he is. In this way, Lampert-Weissig sees Bella as a feminist hero, demanding equality and making her own choices rather than allowing herself to be told what to do by the authoritarian Edward or the other god-like Cullens.

But the Mormon story of creation as it informs Twilight goes deeper than simply the story of Eve’s free will to choose to fall in taking the fruit. It is not only in becoming a vampire that Bella becomes god-like. She gains immortality, yes, but that is at the hands (or teeth) of Edward, the patriarch of all patriarchs here. She forces him to it by coming close to death in childbirth. And it is in childbirth that Mormon doctrine ennobles women. Thus, the argument that Meyer’s Twilight is all about keeping women in traditional roles is true. But it also has a powerful demand that women in these roles be seen as heroic, even as super-human. Immortality in Mormonism comes to women through their work as wives and mothers quite literally.

Mormons believe in a universal resurrection and in a nearly universal heaven. The only hell in Mormon theology is a waiting space like purgatory, but which Mormons call “spirit prison” where those who do not acknowledge Christ await missionaries to come to them and teach them. As soon as they are converted and have temple work done (thus the Mormon need to continually do ordinances for those who are dead), they can cross from “spirit prison” into “spirit paradise” where all the righteous converted dwell.

Once the final judgment happens, all will be allowed to choose a kingdom (celestial, telestial, terrestrial) depending on where they are most comfortable. Each kingdom will be ruled over by a member of the Godhead, and only a very small handful of God’s children will be sent to a place called “Outer Darkness” where they are forever cut off from the presence of God (and even these will be immortal in resurrected bodies). My understanding of this doctrine is that there is likely to be movement between the kingdoms in the eternities, and that ultimately, all will eventually complete the path to godhood. But this whole plan is dependent on women. Why? Because only women can give birth to bodies, and it is these bodies which are the stuff of immortality.

Mormons believe that God Himself has a body, that it is a necessary part of godhood to be flesh and blood (though exalted, immortal, resurrected flesh and blood). According to Joseph Smith, God was at one point a mortal man, and He became a god through the same process that will be open to all men. Women, on the other hand, may have a slightly different path to immortality and godhood, and that path demands becoming wives and mothers, because only through women can all of the waiting spirits of God’s children, begin the path to finding their own bodies which can be transformed into godly stuff.

In Twilight, Bella does not realize that she can get pregnant when she and Edward consummate their marriage. She assumes, in fact, that she can’t. Nonetheless, when she is given the choice between saving her own (physical, mortal) life and saving the life of her child, she chooses her child. Now, many read this as Meyer’s Mormonism stepping in to argue against abortion. I won’t say absolutely this isn’t true, but it is at the very least incomplete. For Bella to choose completing a pregnancy over saving her own life, is, in the Mormon view of women’s possible godhood, her choosing immortality over mortality.

In the final and fourth book of the series, Breaking Dawn, Edward has to bite Bella to make her a vampire, but it is her child through whom Bella saves the world. Even if Edward had let Bella die, the story of Twilight demands that we believe that Renee-esmee is the most important person ever born. Bella is, in this situation, a new Mary. She has given birth to a new Christ who will save the vampires (and possibly humans). Whether Bella lives or dies after that is almost insignificant. She has been elevated to godhood already, by making the god of all gods, the vampire of all vampires.

Valerie Hudson Cassler, a convert to Mormonism from Catholicism, argues passionately that of Christian religions, Mormonism is the most feminist because of the Mormon view of Eve as a wise woman who made the right choice to leave the paradise of Eden and accept the pain of mortality and motherhood. Cassler argues that other versions of Christianity teach “that a woman’s body is unclean, that God meant women to submit to their husbands and in general be subservient to men, and that divinity is male and male alone.” Mormons, by contrast, teach in their temples that women will becomes “priestesses” and “goddesses” alongside their husbands.

Cassler writes

It is through women that souls journey to mortality and gain their agency, and in general it is through the nurturing of women, their nurturing love of their children, that the light of Christ is awakened within each soul. And we should include in that list of souls Jesus the Christ. Even Christ our Lord was escorted to mortality and veiled in flesh through the gift of a woman, fed at his mother’s breast, and awakened to all that is good and sweet in the world. Women escort every soul through the veil to mortal life and full agency. It is interesting to think that even Adam, who was created before Eve, entered into full mortality and full agency by accepting the gift of the First Tree from the hand of a woman. In a sense, Adam himself was born of Eve.

Mormon men have the priesthood which allows them to seal families together, and in essence, to return these families to God, thus healing the wound that the Fall created. In a sense, the Mormon Edward officiates over Bella’s passage through death back to eternal life.

But Bella’s female and divine power is separate from Edward’s. She cannot make herself a vampire, true. But she has a far more important role. Within the Mormon context of male/female relationships, Bella is equal to and perhaps more powerful than Edward. Her female “sphere” of giving birth isn’t a “curse” that follows because of Eve’s choice to take the fruit in the Garden of Eden and thus ensure the suffering and death of all mankind. Rather, she clings to her own power despite the cost and the voices around her demanding that she cede all power to Edward. She makes the choice, and, as in the Mormon version of the Fall, the reluctant Adam/Edward follows after. Ultimately, Edward is forced to admit that this Fall was also a fortunate one, that all his years of debating with Bella, he was wrong and she was right. She was always meant to be a vampire at his side, a “monster” who has power over life and death in her femininity. Bella takes up the Mormon role of motherhood to become the divine path to birth and life on Earth, a role as important as Mormon priesthood, which rules over death and the final approach to immortality.

Twilight is by no means a typical feminist narrative. Instead of demanding that women are capable of taking over male roles (a vital part of Amerian political feminism), Twilight glorifies the traditional female roles of wife and motherhood and points out the power inherent in those. I don’t mean to argue that this point of view should be accepted without question. Certainly, within the Mormon Church and in plenty of other churches and cultures, women have been told that if they only accept their role, they will find power within the existing structure of patriarchy. I am suspicious of Mormonism’s exclusively male priesthood and the insistence that men and women are eternally different with different roles. But on the other hand, I am equally suspicious of being told that there is no power in motherhood, since as a mother, I have felt tremendous satisfaction and yes, even power. Twilight is a powerful story about a woman finding power in motherhood and if that seems regressive, I think that is not seeing the story deeply enough in its reconception of divine female power within the Mormon mythos.

Manic Pixie Dream Edward

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The entire Twilight Roundtable is here.
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images-1The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, as Wikipedia will tell you, is a stock character in films whose purpose is to be free, free like a wind bunny who is free, and also to make the main male character childlike and happy and wind bunnyish as well. Think Zooey Descahnel in…well, just about anything.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is obviously a gendered trope. She’s got “girl” right there in her name…and in a lot of ways she’s a caricature of femininiity — childlike, innocent, cute, and, of course, sexy and sexualized. Ergo, there are no Manic Pixie Dream Guys. The manic pixies are always girls.

Or so you’d think. The truth, though, is that there are male characters who function much like MPDG. For instance, take the character of George in “A Room With a View”. Like a MPDG, George’s main function is to connect the main character, Lucy Honeychurch, to her own inner wonderfulness and passion. Before she meets George and his father, Mr. Emerson, Lucy is boring, conventional and worst of all insincere. The only sign that she has depths is her marvelous piano playing, which prompts one bystander to comment, “If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her.”

Of course, she does eventually start to live as she plays…and the reason is George, her own MPDG, who leaps naked from pools and kisses her amidst violets and divests her of all her stifling armor of convention.

Still, the divesting, not to mention the armor, works a little differently than when the MPDG is a woman. Again, gender is central to the pixie dream girl trope; if you make the pixie a guy, he not only looks a bit different, he functions differently as well. In Yes Man, the MPDG’s goofy femme unconventionality frees Jim Carrey from his hidebound, sexless boringness — she teaches the stultified man the feminine beauty of having no responsibilities. In A Room With a View, the terms are shuffled a bit — a shuffling shown in part, perhaps, by the fact that we see much more of Lucy’s relationship with Mr. Emerson (George’s father) than we see of her relationship with George himself. Where Carrey gets to be a child, Lucy learns from, and gets strength from, a father. Deschanal inspires Carrey to let go of his life; George, and particularly George’s father, inspires Lucy to grab hold of hers. Similarly, in the Lord of the Rings films, Eowyn is attracted to Aragorn even more strongly when she learns that he’s old enough to be her grandfather, because what attracts her to him is in fact his mystical, hyperbolic fatherness; his stature and power and fighting arm, all of which she desires for herself, and so desires in him.
 

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Part of the poignance of the Eowyn/Aragorn relationship — and a big part of the reason the MPDG has more emotional heft when the genders are switched — is because it’s pretty clearly a reaction to sexism. Eowyn speaks repeatedly and eloquently about her frustration with the limits placed on her as a woman — about how she longs to be a warrior and fight for her people and her king, but is instead continually shunted off to cook and tend to children and the elderly. For Jim Carrey, the MPDG is a sop to make up for the fact that his ex dumped him. That sop takes the form of fantasy woman who acts as his ego appendage, which tends to diminish sympathy inasmuch as it suggests that his ex maybe knew what she was doing when she left him in the first place. For Eowyn, on the other hand, the magic man is a sop to make up for the fact that she is trapped by sexism. It’s not a good solution, perhaps (as the film realizes) — but that only makes her predicament more tragic.

Another example of this is George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which is basically a brutal critique of the Manic Pixie Dream Guy — or, in this case, of the Somber Genius Dream Daddy. Dorothea marries Casaubon because she sees him as a kind of intellectual phallus — a quintessential father who can usher her into the male world of thought and meaningfulness. In the event, though, it turns out that he is not the phallus, but a selfish old man. A romantic partner is just a person, not a gateway to a new self. In Middlemarch, other people can’t transform you — at least, not all at once, and generally not for the better. Which doesn’t mean that Eliot condemns Dorothea. On the contrary, Dorothea’s essentially feminist wish to escape her limited circumstances as a woman is seen as entirely reasonable. Looking to a man to help her do that is obviously not ideal and doesn’t turn out well — but limited options lead to less than ideal decisions.

Bringing us to Twilight. Meyer’s story is often seen as anti-feminist because Bella gives up everything — her friends, college, her human life — in order to be with Edward.
I think, though, that this is a fundamental misreading of the series. Bella doesn’t give up her life for Edward. Rather, Edward exists for Bella, in the same way that Manic Pixie Dream Girls exist for the guys they save.

In fact, Meyer goes out of her way to reiterate again and again that Bella’s specialness precedes Edward, and in some sense calls him into being — just as Lucy’s passionate Beethoven precedes, and structurally necessitates, her encounter with George. Much of the first part of the first novel of Twilight is given over to descriptions of how out of place Bella feels among her peers. We also learn that she has always been able to smell blood like a vampire does, rather than like a human — and of course Edward can’t read her thoughts, and finds her scent almost magically appetizing. In short, Bella, like Lucy, has depths. When she chooses Edward, she does not turn her back on her wonderful, magical life — she picks it up.

Edward, then, is less a character than he is an embodiment of Bella’s desire for herself — a kind of projected self-actualization. Meyer’s genius for giving Bella not just what she wants, but what she wants to be, is, then, at the heart of the book’s considerable appeal. Edward is both (old, siring) father and young lover, both dark vampire and sparkly elf, both safe (he’s reluctant to even kiss her) and dangerous, both outsider and — with his weird, incestuous, close-knit Mormon family — insider. Most of all, though, he is power. And that power is specifically the power to get out of the boring conventions of tween high school girlness — the clothes shopping, the gossip, the high school interpersonal angst that Bella clearly loathes — and into adventure and danger and superpowers and magic. If the choice is between going to prom and being stalked by a vampire, Bella would much prefer being stalked by a vampire — as she says at the end of the first book, when she is disappointed that Edward is taking her to the dance rather than changing her into one of the undead.

Again, there’s genius in Edward’s pixie dream guyness, not least in the fact that he is clearly marked as fantasy or dream — as a sparkling elf, who literally carries Bella off into the magic woods. George grants Lucy her own inner passion; Edward does the same for Bella, while acknowledging more explicitly that this dream is her dream. George is a bit indistinct to the extent that he’s supposed to be real — Edward, in being a figment, is significantly more vivid.

This is not an unalloyed good by any means. Edward as wish has the striking, indelible energy of Superman or Peter Pan — or, for that matter, of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl herself. But Twilight is ostensibly supposed to be not (only) a fairy tale, but (at least in part) a romance. In that context, Edward’s transparent non-existence ceases to make him iconic, and just makes him tiresome. Edward as idealized portal to NeverNeverLand has at least the power of its own over-determined longing. Edward as actual lover, though, runs aground in the same way that MPDG romances always do. The MPDG, after all, is not a person in her own right; she’s a trope whose purpose is to help the main character self-actualize.

You can certainly see why young girls might respond to Twilight. Cultural products in which the male ego gets to annex all the world are almost as prevalent as male egos themselves. But cultural products in which tween girls are themselves and their lovers and superpowered sprites as well are much less common. Still, while I can see the charm, I have to say that rereading the first volume was not exactly painful, but not especially enjoyable either. For me, at least Twilight fails not because Bella is erased by, or loses herself in, Edward, but rather because there isn’t ever an Edward there at all. The only problem with that magic pixie too good to be true is that he isn’t true. For a romance to succeed, there need to be two people present. When Bella talks to Edward, though, it’s hard to escape the conviction that she’s engaged in a lengthy and self-aggrandizing monologue.

How Twilight is Allowing Women to Fulfill Fantasies of Sexual and Supernatural Empowerment… and Everyone Hates Them for it

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The entire Twilight Roundtable is here.
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There’s a good chance that many of you are here reading this article because you, like everyone else you know, incontestably hate Twilight. Do you ever wish it would just GO AWAY? Are are so sick of hearing about Edward and Jacob, that you want the whole thing to just disappear from existence? Well you are not alone. This article is, in fact, about hating Twilight but the twist is… I don’t hate it. Actually, I sort of like it.

But, I am sure that the odds are in my favour that you probably do hate Twilight, or you are at least annoyed with it in a way that unsettles you. But why? Is it because you don’t think the books are any kind of sterling literature? Is it because Bella Swan isn’t “powerful” enough as a female role model? Is it because you don’t like Kristen Stewart’s ever-glassy visage, or Robert Pattinson’s combination of glittering epidermis and hair gel? Is it a plot hole? Ask yourself right now, is there something about Twilight narrative that you specifically hate?

If the answer runs something to the tune of, “well, I don’t hate it or anything… I simply just don’t want to read or watch the damn thing,” good for you! But another hypothetical, if you’ll humor me: if tomorrow one of your good friends, maybe your partner, or boss, or child walked up to you told you they had read the entire Twilight series and actually really enjoyed it, would you still feel the same way about them? Any chance your respect for them would take a dip, if only marginally? Taking this one step further, is there any other book they could have claimed to have read and enjoyed that would have left the same affect?

I ask because it often looks as though the internet has regressed into a goddamn hunting ground for Twilight fandom. Not only are Twilight hate sites rampant, but Twilight hate memes are some of the most pervasive images circulating on social networking sites daily. People have become eager anti-fans of the series, creating an active subculture that manifests in hateful dialogue and value judgements on a seemingly arbitrary slice of a very large pop culture pie. Instead of putting effort into enjoying their own “things” they spend their time not enjoying Twilight. Loudly.

The majority of these memes fall into a few distinct categories:

1. I hate Bella memes: detailing someones hatred for Kristen Stewart or Bella, or an interchangeable mess of the two; because she isn’t a strong enough role model or she doesn’t react to things in a “proper” way. Usually measures her against other nerd-heroines Katniss, Hermione, or Buffy etc.
 

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2. “Still a better love story than Twilight” memes: People illustrating their knowledge of the romance genre by juxtaposing the tag line against an image of something that either is or isn’t a good “love story”. Examples may be: a photo of a guys right hand, Tom Hanks and Wilson, the movie poster for dumb and dumber, a horse mounting someone etc. The most offensive memes of this category and ones that blend into type 3, implying that love story chosen for pictorial representation is invalid in some way. By choosing Broke Back Mountain as their example, this meme implies both that Twilight is a “worse” love story and that there is something repulsive about BrokeBack Mountain as well.
 

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3. One of the most offensives types is the “Still not as gay as Twilight” meme: If you stumble upon this cache of memes you may think this is a simple case of some ignorant person who doesn’t care about gay rights using the term “gay” as interchangeable with “bad”, but it is actually much worse than that. What is often happening in these memes is the creators are using images of people who are gay, or who are performing acts that could be interpreted as gay, and then adding on the tagline of “still not as gay as Twilight.” So what they mean is in fact, Twilight is bad, therefore gay is bad and in fact Twilight, somehow with it’s heterosexual love triangle is the “gayest,” and therefore the “worst.”
 

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4. The last category of memes don’t have a unifying caption. They instead are memes that include a male figure who, either dumps, beats, or murders his girlfriend/wife/random woman when she mentions she has watched/read/enjoyed Twilight. A disturbing illustration of desire, hyperbolic or not, brings me to the point of this article.

 

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These anti-Twilight memes and Twilight-hate culture on the whole have very little to do with Twilight, and a lot more to do with systemic sexism and rampant misogyny, and the whole mess could use a feminist perspective. I know, I just dropped the S, M and F bomb in one sentence but hear me out here: we live in a culture, that does not want women to embrace their sexuality, and it REALLY doesn’t want them to do it in a “geeky” way. The original phenomenon wrought by the Twilight books was simply a bunch of girls geeking out over a series of books subsequently turned into a successful film series. The story is no different than the phenomenon of, say, people geeking out over Harry Potter or Batman, and their inevitable film series. The only difference being, when it is women who are the distinct majority enjoying themselves, everyone else gets condescending, snarky, or even angry.

If you need proof of this prejudice existing in other fan cultures you can look at any examination of the fake geek girl problem that is supposedly plaguing society right now. For a notably recent example, take a look at the articles about the #1reasonwhy detailing why women are not welcomed in the gaming industry as creators or participants. It’s a long time coming, but it seems people are finally willing to call the lack of female presence in nerd subcultures out for what it is: sexism. Normally this sexism takes place in conversations about a women’s validity as a geek and therefore her exclusion from that culture. Conversely, this sexism in nerd subculture is much more difficult to name when it is directed at a grouping that is almost entirely female, where men may even feel excluded i.e.Twilight.

Let’s go back in time a bit to examine this further. Before the Twilight movies were released the books themselves were extremely popular among young adult (YA) and female readers. Most people at this point had likely never heard of Twilight. This was a time before Twilight was connected with its silver screen players Stewart, Pattinson, or Taylor Lautner, though word of the films’ production were widespread and the pop culture “aura” around it was entirely different. Twilight has been around since 2005 when the book made its debut and immense popularity. People read Twilight in the way they would have read any other YA series that was hot at the moment and visibly loved it, so Meyer continued to write more of the series. These books-turned-films remain popular because people enjoyed reading them. They read them, as I read them: as a consumer ignorant of the cultural impact the books would have, happily indulging in the fantasy/horror/romance narrative in the same way I would indulge in any other piece of pop fiction or television. Women were lining up outside of bookstores, cosplaying as vampires, speculating about the future of the series, which characters would live or die, and what team would win the battle for Bella’s heart. Utterly captivated by the world Meyer had built, these fans (predominantly women) were just geeking out.

Those on the inside of this culture, were also just enjoying reading, something that is unfortunately rare this day in age. For the most part at this point the Twilight culture was unknown and left alone, yet the first movie’s release signaled to the rest of contemporary pop culture that the series — and it’s fans — had successfully arrived. When outsiders looking in saw these large gatherings of Twilight fans outside of theaters, they were spectator to a group enjoyment that didn’t quite synch up, and met the source material with confusion, aggression, and hatred: a large group of females enjoying themselves. So they looked on them with the same hatred normally reserved for girls lining up for Justin Bieber concerts.

Twilight allowed for a entire movement of young women to revel in not only a fantasy world and fandom without fear of exclusion (like say worlds in comic and video game subcultures) and it also allowed them to revel in their sexuality, openly, by fantasizing about the imaginary Edward and Jacob. This reveling only became stronger when those fantasies saw a fleshed out actualization in the performances of Robert Patinson and Taylor Launter. Women everywhere had tiny intertextual nerdgasams upon the realization that Harry Potter’s Cedric Digory would be playing Edward Cullen.

Every action will have an equal and opposite reaction, so the groundswell enjoyment of the Twi-hards was abruptly stomped out by a larger cultural consensus that Twilight’s success indicated the end of times, or something equally as dramatic. This was partly the result of comic and sci-fi conventions being taken over by thousands of adoring fans looking to see whatever Twilight movie actor was there signing autographs. People were pissed off about the ways in which Twilight was somehow ruining their lives, so they started making memes about it.

For myself, the irony often lies in the memes that are confronting Twilight for being sexist itself.

For example, one meme shows a photo of Kristen Stewart and reads, “Women’s rights? lol I need a man to live.” Disregarding the finer details of Bella’s character, her general independence, her lack of desire to get married, her refusal to obey Edward’s constant commands, and her place as the sexual aggressor in her relationship. In the novels, it becomes very clear to a reader that Bella, who is constantly kissed and caressed but never fully satisfied, is motivated to become a vampire in part because of her veritable dripping anticipation to finally get her freak on. It is easy to read these books as a story about a girl who is so horny over the fact that the sexiest man alive wants to be with her for some reason, that she will literarily give her own life to have sex with him. She doesn’t need a man to live, she wants to fuck a man, she wants to marry him, she wants to conquer him, and she wants to become immortal, all within her rights as a woman. The long-awaited build up to any actual sex over the course of the series has, hilariously enough, garnered the series the monicker “abstinence porn,” offering an enjoyment that is arguably more exciting than if the characters were just having sex all along.
 

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The majority of cultural examinations of Twilight seem to be a reaction that simplifies the novels and films by considering them “not feminist enough” to be consumed by supposedly naive young girls. Plenty has been said of the ways in which Twilight is not as feminist as, say, The Hunger Games or Buffy, both of which were pop culture sensations of a similar nature as Twilight that didn’t attract any of the mass hatred possibly, I would argue, because of the gender diversity in the fan base. Memes often frame Bella as a bad female role model, privileging female identification with characters like Buffy as a more positive alternative. You can read more about this here.

The irony I would cite in this beyond what has already been said about this type of meme, is that comparing Buffy and Bella makes very little sense considering that they are constructed for different purposes. Buffy is kind of like Superman: she has this gift, all these powers, she has super strength and a destiny to save the world. This kind of identification is usually a “look up to” connection as opposed to a “I feel so similar to” connection that readers may have with Bella. Bella essentially functions in the same way as a Peter Parker. He is a plain and boring studious type before he is bitten by a spider and granted his powers. Just a normal everyday guy who is granted superpowers. Fans have identified with Bella in the same way. There is a twofold desire that encompasses not only the sexual desire for Edward and Jacob but also the desire for superpowers, to become something, or someone more. Comparing Bella to Buffy to make a point about the degree to which Buffy and her readership are more feminist, virtuous and empowered is akin to a meme juxtaposing Superman and Spiderman and claiming that those who identified with Spiderman are inherently “lesser” men. I suspect that this specific type of meme, comparing female characters is likely often actually created by women attempting to make a point about empowering our gender, but the inadvertent effect involves a backwards girl hate.

Sometimes women do not fit our definition of what female “strength” should look like (especially when that strength often involves merely repurposing a traditionally masculine rhetoric of strength), but that does not make them weak. We see a similar problem in the mass treatment of Kristen Stewart by both fans and anti-fans of Twilight. It became trendy to critique her for the plainness that was so integral to her character in the novels. The cultural opinion surrounding Bella in the narrative is only compounded by the hatred and slut-shaming directed at Stewart in real life, citing her personal affairs, and using a completely unrelated element to admonish the storyline. The open, widespread condemnation the women in these narratives weak, or anti-feminist, or masochist, or submissive signifies to women who identify so strongly with these characters that the same must be true about themselves. Why can’t we look at these issues of female empowerment as a complex system of women who are still having difficulty coming to terms with their roles in their relationships, instead of simply pushing these women out of the feminist “us” camp and into the “them” camp where they will be considered lesser women.

The Twilight-hate culture is fueled from two sides. One side is the meme culture that I have been citing and the second is typified by articles such as this) which have decided to examine the series as an anti-feminist archetype, and seem to only be able to see the narrative through that lens. Instead of examining the way a narrative such as this is empowering for female sexuality, or examining the ways that these female fan communities allow women to express their sexual desires in a way they are not allowed to in day to day life, the anti-Twilight camp focuses entirely on Edward and Bella’s relationship. It simplifies the narrative into a tale of emotional abuse in which Bella is nothing more than a passive onlooker in her own life. Instead of examining Rosalie’s (One of Edward’s sisters) revenge fantasy in which she, as a vampire, goes back and kills a group of men who gang raped her as a human they focus on Edward “wanting to kill” Bella. Instead of examining Jasper’s description of his previous abusive relationship and how he overcame that, critics want to depict Edward as abuser. Instead of examining the ways that Bella outsmarts her supernatural enemies, detractors focus on the ways in which Edward physically saves her. Instead of examining the ways that a new depiction of feminism may be emerging in popular culture many are deeming Twilight as the death of feminism, or as one article put it “The Franchise That Ate Feminism.

I am not trying to argue for extreme literary complexity in any of these works. What I am arguing for is extreme cultural complexity. The simplistic nature you may see in these characters does not mean that our analysis of the series, and therefore its resulting fan culture, should be just as simplistic. Feminism is not dead, this is something I can guarantee you. For years I have been hearing claims that Bridget Jones, or Sex in the City, or Jersey Shore, or a variety of things were to be “the death of feminism.” Saying that Twilight’s anti-feminist nature will confuse our world’s young girls into abusive relationships or unwilling submission is in my opinion a regressive, sexist notion itself. It is implying that the women reading this narrative or any other cannot reason or deduce for themselves the degree to which they identify with any given fiction, nor ideal of sexuality. If young girls want to read Twilight, if they choose to read Twilight, if they choose to enjoy Twilight… and you tell them not to because it’s “wrong”, or you tell them that their enjoyment reflects their own weak intellect — well, that doesn’t bode well for feminism to me.

On this note Meyer herself says:

In my own opinion (key word), the foundation of feminism is this: being able to choose. The core of anti-feminism is, conversely, telling a woman she can’t do something solely because she’s a woman—taking any choice away from her specifically because of her gender… One of the weird things about modern feminism is that some feminists seem to be putting their own limits on women’s choices. That feels backward to me. It’s as if you can’t choose a family on your own terms and still be considered a strong woman. How is that empowering? Are there rules about if, when, and how we love or marry and if, when, and how we have kids? Are there jobs we can and can’t have in order to be a “real” feminist? To me, those limitations seem anti-feminist in basic principle.

Admittedly this isn’t the precise way I would define feminism, but I think what Meyer is saying here is very important. The key being that you don’t tell a “woman she can’t do something solely because she is a women” by placing acceptable “limits on women’s choices.” We need to allow girls and women to choose what they want to enjoy, and we also need to learn not to taint that enjoyment because we feel that women enjoying themselves threatens some higher, reserved ideal of feminism. If there is one thing that I am sure could be the death of feminism: it is us telling young girls that they are not feminists.

I think Twilight is one of the best things to happen to young female sexuality in the same way that I think that Fifty Shades of Grey is one of the best things to happen to adult female sexuality. We live in a culture that is overwhelmingly sex negative, particularly for women. If the only porn that women will consume is “abstinence porn” and its fan fiction, that is okay with me. Who CARES whether or not the writing in these novels meets some arbitrary level of lexical intricacy or allegorical nuance? Young adults are reading, and they’re privy to a literary artifact which offers a safe, enjoyable exploration of their perfectly natural sexual impulses. No one examines male pornography and critiques it for the quality of its “love story” or sentence structure; in the same light women should be able to indulge in media that is just as permissibly “bad.” I am just so so so happy that women are looking their sexual desires in the face and confronting it as a regular component of their lives in society. Bella and Anna are not the categorically defined “kick ass” females that we have BEEN TOLD are good role models. But if they are characters who plenty of women identify with on a mass scale, then we ought not to focus on the lack of empowerment as defined by their contemporaries, and instead recognize that women of our society identify SO strongly with these female characters regardless. Not because every woman who reads Twilight or 50 Shades is a submissive antifeminist who simply wants to be told what to do, but because women are starving for the type of sexual fantasy that men are allowed to indulge in guilt free everyday. What we can glean from this, also, is that the definitions of female empowerment should not be so static or rigidly defined because dominant character aspects in any one popular text. Female empowerment is not measured by a ratio of aggression, independence, intelligence, or even sexuality, or the mere sum of these parts; rather, the empowered feminist-positive ideal is a comprehensive whole built of of these aspects, but with varying degrees as our role models slip and segue through different contextual representations: Buffy and Bella are every bit as ideal because they are constructed so differently for their own respective universe.

Lev Grossman put it much better than I ever could way back in 2008 when he said:

What makes Meyer’s books so distinctive is that they’re about the erotics of abstinence. Their tension comes from prolonged, superhuman acts of self-restraint. There’s a scene midway through Twilight in which, for the first time, Edward leans in close and sniffs the aroma of Bella’s exposed neck. ‘Just because I’m resisting the wine doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the bouquet,’ he says. ‘You have a very floral smell, like lavender … or freesia.’ He barely touches her, but there’s more sex in that one paragraph than in all the snogging in Harry Potter. It’s never quite clear whether Edward wants to sleep with Bella or rip her throat out or both, but he wants something, and he wants it bad, and you feel it all the more because he never gets it. That’s the power of the Twilight books: they’re squeaky, geeky clean on the surface, but right below it, they are absolutely, deliciously filthy.

Will we ever be able to return to a state of mind where we see our daughters reading Twilight the same way we would see our daughters reading superhero comics? Will it ever again appear to people as “squeaky geeky clean”?

Let me get one last thing straight: I fucking love memes. I think a well crafted meme is like a work of poetry, when the subtext is strong and the juxtaposition is subtle and surprising. A good meme and the laugh that accompanies it is revitalizing, like a good cup of coffee. But for every well constructed meme there are about 10,000 shitty memes. I would say that all of these memes above are not popular, not “sticky” as Malcolm Gladwell would put it, because of their content being smart or well assembled. They are instead pushed forward and propelled through cyberspace by hatred for a subculture of women. I say, instead of creating and sharing these hate fueled memes about whatever is the current pop culture thing you don’t understand, you instead spend more time creating memes about things you do like: poking fun at the intricacies of your favorite books, TV shows and films that you get, and think harder before laying down an easy critique of cultures you aren’t involved in.
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Emma Vossen is a comics and sexuality scholar currently completing her PhD at the University of Waterloo. Her poetry is published in the upcoming Masked Mosaic anthology of fiction about Canadian comics. When she has time she writes about sex, feminism and comics at www.getsomeactioncomics.com